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As the smoke ascended an eagle shot from the summit,
circled a moment, and disappeared. For the sum
of a million sesterces a senator swore that with the
eagle he had seen the emperor’s soul.

III

FABULOUS FIELDS

Mention Tiberius, and the name evokes a taciturn tyrant,
devising in the crypts of a palace infamies so monstrous
that to describe them new words were coined.

In the Borghese collection Tiberius is rather good-looking
than otherwise, not an Antinous certainly, but manifestly
a dreamer; one whose eyes must have been almost feline
in their abstraction, and in the corners of whose
mouth you detect pride, no doubt, but melancholy as
well. The pride was congenital, the melancholy
was not.

Under Tiberius there was quiet, a romancer wrote,
and the phrase in its significance passed into legend.
During the dozen or more years that he ruled in Rome,
his common sense was obvious. The Tiber overflowed,
the senate looked for a remedy in the Sibyline Books.
Tiberius set some engineers to work. A citizen
swore by Augustus and swore falsely. The senate
sought to punish him, not for perjury but for sacrilege.
It is for Augustus to punish, said Tiberius.
The senate wanted to name a month after him. Tiberius
declined. “Supposing I were the thirteenth
Caesar, what would you do?” For years he reigned,
popular and acclaimed, caring the while nothing for
popularity and less for pomp. Sagacious, witty
even, believing perhaps in little else than fate and
mathematics, yet maintaining the institutions of the
land, striving resolutely for the best, outwardly
impassable and inwardly mobile, he was a man and his
patience had bounds. There were conspirators in
the atrium, there was death in the courtier’s
smile; and finding his favorites false, his life threatened,
danger at every turn, his conception of rulership
changed. Where moderation had been suddenly there
gleamed the axe.

Tacitus, always dramatic, states that at the time
terror devastated the city. It so happened that
under the republic there was a law against whomso
diminished the majesty of the people. The republic
was a god, one that had its temple, its priests, its
altars. When the republic succumbed, its divinity
passed to the emperor; he became Jupiter’s peer,
and, as such, possessed of a majesty which it was
sacrilege to slight. Consulted on the subject,
Tiberius replied that the law must be observed.
Originally instituted in prevention of offences against
the public good, it was found to change into a crime,
a word, a gesture or a look. It was a crime to
undress before a statue of Augustus, to mention his
name in the latrinae, to carry a coin with his image
into a lupanar. The punishment was death.
Of the property of the accused, a third went to the
informer, the rest to the state. Then abruptly
terror stalked abroad. No one was safe except
the obscure, and it was the obscure that accused.